The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things. Tim Radford

book.

      Chapter Two

       The Town The Man from Somewhere

      In June 1652, smallpox being rife in London, the diarist John Evelyn left his wife and mother-in-law taking the waters at Tunbridge Wells, and headed for London. It was hot, he sent his manservant on ahead, and rode ‘negligently under favour of the shade’ till he got within three miles of Bromley, at a place called the Procession Oak. Suddenly, ‘Two cut-throates started out, and striking with long staves at the horse, and taking hold of the reines threw me downe, took my sword, and haled me into a deepe thicket some quarter of a mile from the highway, where they might securely rob me, as they soone did.’ Evelyn observed that ‘it would teach me never to ride neere an hedge, since had I been in the mid-way they durst not have adventur’d on me; at which they cock’d their pistols, and told me they had long guns too, and were 14 companions’.

      Evelyn lived, of course, to tell the tale. The story is a reminder that towns grew up as they did not because they could deliver jobs, public transport, banks, schools, recycling centres and planned housing: they grew up as they did to offer security to like-minded people in a menacing world. For much of European history, the countryside could be a dangerous place, home to vagabonds, beggars, fraudsters, robbers, smugglers, outlaws and freebooting soldiery. Kings reigned in capitals, but farther from the seats of power, their barons could do as they pleased, and often did; and pilgrims, merchants and craftsmen travelled in convoy, or hired an escort, or kept together as best they could, for their own protection.

      The wildwood was a threatening environment. In 1285, the Statute of Winchester by Edward I required local landholders to clear the scrub, coppices and ditches for two hundred feet on either side of the highway between market towns, to prevent surprise attacks by highwaymen, footpads and robber bands. In such a world, European towns became places of safety for the people of the countryside: safe from outlaws, safe from the notional upholders of the feudal law, too. Perhaps because they had gates that could be locked at night and watched by daylight, towns became independent entities: communities of free citizens who could control trade and join guilds and plan cathedrals and repair battlements; could impose quarantine to keep leprosy or the plague at bay; could support hospitals and almshouses for the sick and elderly and build bath-houses and complain about sanitation; could levy tolls and impose building regulations; could decide to support a prince, or defy him; who could declare for the king or the Puritans in one country, or for the pope or the Cathars in another, or even declare neutrality, as Bremen did in the Thirty Years War.

      Medieval towns, says the historian Lewis Mumford in The Culture of the Cities (1938), ‘won the right to hold a regular market, the right to be subject to a special market law, the right to coin money and establish weights and measures, the right of citizens to be tried in their local courts and to bear arms in their own defence’. These were places that offered security and demanded loyalty; and each was different, with variant laws and customs, differing traditions and festivals, unique privileges and obligations, and unique penalties, too. Such towns might even, once they reached a certain level of commercial power and population density, grow into city-states or self-contained republics: Florence was one, and Venice another; Geneva a third, Strasbourg a fourth. Something of this sense of community, this sense of mutual support, survives in all local patriotism. A town was once, and in some ways still is, a place of belonging. You belong to Glasgow. Chicago is your kind of town. Maybe it’s because you’re a Londoner.

      This sense of membership, of belonging, becomes in some ways a part of the identity that others confer upon us. Dickens’s wonderful novel Our Mutual Friend announces one of its themes and introduces one of its protagonists in the second chapter with an idle dinner-party conversation about a capricious legacy that has befallen a man whose origins nobody can remember: Jamaica, Tobago, or … and it comes to the narrator at last, ‘the country where they make the Cape Wine’. For conversational shorthand, however, the migrant in search of his inheritance has already become simply ‘the man from somewhere’. Interestingly, although it is his life history, and his strange fortune, the bizarre codicil to a dusty legacy, that is compelling, to achieve even conversational reality, this person must first of all have a geographic location, however insubstantial: the man from somewhere. He must be placed, before his history can begin, and even though he is no longer there, he has departed, he has earned the preposition ‘from’, and his place of origin, however imprecise, is his first identification.

      Towns confer an identity that grows from a sense of community. That word carries a strange burden, even in the original language. The French word commune in Latin was something that was common, in the sense of shared, for common use; it could also mean a community or state. Communio, according to my ancient Latin Dictionary for Schools, implied fellowship and mutual participation; but it also had a second meaning: to fortify on all sides, to barricade, to entrench. If you were a townsman, you were not a villein, not a feudal serf, not a bondsman, not tied to a manor or fated to till someone else’s fields, you were not a beggar or a vagrant, a person with no rights, and with no fixed abode. Citizenship of a town authorised not just security and a certain fragile dignity, it also conferred identity, and this identity lives on in names, stories, plays, songs, psalms and ballads, in signatures, in public records, almost everywhere we choose to look, and sometimes we become so accustomed to the organic link between townsman and town that we barely notice the conjunction.

      For example, when Jesus of Nazareth could no longer carry the cross on which he was to be crucified, Roman soldiers pressed a foreign visitor or tourist to help him. That is why we know about Simon of Cyrene: because three Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, all record the incident. After Jesus died – with, according to the Gospel of John, the Roman lettering Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm, or Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews – above his head, a rich man called Joseph of Arimathea asked the Roman governor for his body. This story achieved its widest circulation once the Old and New Testaments had been printed in moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg. But even people who have never read the Gospels know the story, because episodes from the life and death of the Nazarene have been discussed by Augustine of Hippo and St Teresa of Avila and painted by Raphael of Urbino and Leonardo da Vinci. I can find no reference to Cyrene or Arimathea in the essays of Michel de Montaigne.

      There is a clear theme here: everybody in this account so far is quite naturally identified by his or her place of origin, that is, the place from which they had come, and where they might normally have been found. In some cases, the identification is so sure and so natural that the name-bearers are sometimes referred to only by the places from which they had come. Michel Eyquem took the extended name de Montaigne from the château that his trader family had purchased in Perigord. His essais (literally, attempts) were composed there, and he is now known in the English-speaking literary world simply as Montaigne. Johannes Gensfleisch zu Laden zum Gutenberg’s final surname comes not from his father but from the agricultural estate where his father lived. Vinci is a small Florentine commune or town in Tuscany that has been in existence for at least eight hundred years: so emphatic, however, is the fame of its most famous son that (once again in the English-speaking world) he is often and no doubt incorrectly referred to as da Vinci, as if it were a formal modern surname, like de Tocqueville. Nazareth is still known in Hebrew as Natz’rat and in Arabic as al-Nasira. It is an Israeli town with a large Arab and Christian population, and it is incontestably the home of the Jesus of the Gospels: his birth in Bethlehem is reported as an administrative accident during an episode of temporary urban overcrowding. Nazareth in Galilee dates from the Bronze Age: two thousand years ago it had a reputation of sorts among people elsewhere in the region because, in the Gospel of John, a certain Nathaniel asks rhetorically, ‘Can good come from Nazareth?’

      Arimathea, on the other hand, is described by Luke as ‘a city of the Jews’, but which city, and where it might be found, is not known. Biblical scholars have proposed several candidate locations, including the modern Palestinian town of Ramallah, on the West Bank, but for all the available evidence Joseph might as easily have come from Glastonbury in Somerset, a town much linked with his name. Cyrene is more easily identified: it was an ancient Greek colony – known to Herodotus – on the African shores of the Mediterranean, and part of Libya is still called Cyrenaica. Like Alexandria and other Greek cities, it had a Jewish population, and one imagines